You’ve probably seen the news everywhere else by now but for those who missed it, Spore has “gone gold”.
For those not au fait with technobabble, that means the game has been “finished”, the final shipping version of the client has been burnt to a disk (traditionally a gold one) that is then used as the source for replicating all the millions of disks we’ll be receiving in just a couple of weeks time!
With the game due in a bit over 2 weeks it seems an appropriate time to mention that the Sporepedia is currently sitting on 2,812,257 creations. With an average of around 26,000 being made a day (still!) it seems very likely the game will launch with well over three million creatures.
Some will no doubt be essentially duplicates of each other, or very similar in design, but that is still an incredible number.
It certainly makes you wonder how many creations will be on there by the end of the year!
Well, it makes me wonder. It makes you answer this shiny new poll:
The informational pages have gone up two days early on the website for The Daily Telegraph, detailing how you get your hands on the Creature Creator:
Q. Where can I obtain a Spore Creature Creator PC Game?
A. It’s FREE with a token from The Daily Telegraph on Saturday 2 August.
Q. My Spore Creature Creator disk was not in my paper when I purchased it. What do I do?
A. The FREE PC Game is not inserted into the paper itself. You need to cut the token from page 2 of the paper and present it to your newsagent to redeem your Spore Creature Creator disk.
There’s also an address you can send the token in to in order to get your disk, if the newsagent has run out or if you nick a copy out of someone’s garbage or something.
Today’s paper also has a short little pictorial guide to the creator which raises a concern - the pictures show the trial version of the creator, not the full version, as there are clearly parts that are greyed out. This is probably just an error. But, well, the paper costs a buck, and if it’s the trial version it’ll give you a great reason to be even more angry at EA!
… and one other little tidbit. The paper’s Spore FAQ includes September 4th as the release date for the full game. I guess we’re getting it before everyone else to make up for getting boned on the Creature Creator?
There’s a Creature Creator Manual to download from this page.
The FAQ is here.
A little blurb about the offer is here.
Note that while all this is coming from the Daily Telegraph site I would expect the other papers’ (Herald Sun and Courier-Mail) offer to be exactly the same in every way.
Anyone who plans on picking up the Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, or Courier-Mail on Saturday will be in for a pleasant surprise. Included with the newspaper is a free copy of the full-version Spore Creature Creator.
How in the heck they decided this was a good way to promote the game remains a mystery, but for Australian fans who have not already tiptoed around the regional lockouts this looks like your chance!
And it will apparently be your only chance as it is a one time offer.
Even if you already have the full version it may be worth picking yourself up a copy of one of the aforementioned papers as there may be a special deal on offer…
The disc also comes with what an EA spokesperson has called an “AU$15 off per-order at EB [Games stores]“, but refused to go into more detail.
Of course there’s no guarantee EB will have the cheapest price and you may be able to get it for less elsewhere, but if you usually buy from EB anyway…
But victory my fellow Australians! We’re finally going to see a release of the Creature Creator here, a mere month and a half after it was released everywhere else! Hooray!
An interesting detail about Spore emerged from the Comic Con presentation by Will Wright. When the game releases in September players will be able to capture images and video in game then upload them to a site called MashON.com and create comic strips from them.
Or people could go there right now and create e-cards based on their Spore creations!
It doesn’t seem like you can add your own creatures to the cards at the moment though - if you discover otherwise, please share the procedure in the comments.
The comics are supposed to be embeddable and sendable via email when the full service launches. It looks like Spore will be popping up in many more places than we might have imagined!
It seems like only yesterday the Sporepedia was celebrating the 1 million creature mark. It wasn’t, of course, but today is a new milestone for the game with the total creature count surpassing the 2 million mark.
If you were unaware, the Creature Creator has only been available for a bit over a month at this point. Given that the trial version leaked early, it’s around the 40 day mark.
Which makes an average of 50,000 creatures added to the Sporepedia every day!
If you were to look at 1 creature every 10 seconds it would take you 231 days to view them all!
Not that I would recommend such a course. Assuming an average of 25KB per thumbnail file, you’re looking at downloading a staggering fifty gigabytes!
Something tells me we won’t be running into the same creatures too often when the full game ships in September.
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